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With the introduction of concepts such as ubiquitous mapping, mapping-related technologies are gradually applied in autonomous driving and target recognition. There are many problems in vision measurement and remote sensing, such as difficulty in automatic vehicle discrimination, high missing rates under multiple vehicle targets, and sensitivity to the external environment. This paper proposes an improved RES-YOLO detection algorithm to solve these problems and applies it to the automatic detection of vehicle targets. Specifically, this paper improves the detection effect of the traditional YOLO algorithm by selecting optimized feature networks and constructing adaptive loss functions. The BDD100K data set was used for training and verification. Additionally, the optimized YOLO deep learning vehicle detection model is obtained and compared with recent advanced target recognition algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can automatically identify multiple vehicle targets effectively and can significantly reduce missing and false rates, with the local optimal accuracy of up to 95% and the average accuracy above 86% under large data volume detection. The average accuracy of our algorithm is higher than all five other algorithms including the latest SSD and Faster-RCNN. In average accuracy, the RES-YOLO algorithm for small data volume and large data volume is 1.0% and 1.7% higher than the original YOLO. In addition, the training time is shortened by 7.3% compared with the original algorithm. The network is then tested with five types of local measured vehicle data sets and shows satisfactory recognition accuracy under different interference backgrounds. In short, the method in this paper can complete the task of vehicle target detection under different environmental interferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an autonomous vehicle, the lane following algorithm is an important component, which is a basic function of autonomous driving. However, the existing lane following system has a few shortcomings: first, the control method it adopts requires an accurate system model, and different vehicles have different parameters, which needs a lot of parameter calibration work. The second is that it may fail on road sections where the lateral acceleration requirements of vehicles are large, such as large curves. Third, its decision-making system is defined based on rules, which has disadvantages: it is difficult to formulate; human subjective factors cannot guarantee objectivity; coverage is difficult to guarantee. In recent years, the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm has been widely used in the field of autonomous driving due to its strong nonlinear fitting ability and generalization performance. However, the DDPG algorithm has overestimated state action values and large cumulative errors, low training efficiency and other issues. Therefore, this paper improves the DDPG algorithm based on the double critic networks and priority experience replay mechanism. Then this paper proposes a lane following method based on this algorithm. Experiment shows that the algorithm can achieve excellent following results under various road conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Road surface detection is important for safely driving autonomous vehicles. This is because the knowledge of road surface conditions, in particular, dry, wet, and snowy surfaces, should be considered for driving control of autonomous vehicles. With the rise of deep learning technology, road surface detection methods using deep neural networks (DNN) have been widely used for developing road surface detection algorithms. To apply DNN in road surface detection, the dataset should be large and well-balanced for accurate and robust performance. However, most of the images of road surfaces obtained through usual data collection processes are not well-balanced. Most of the collected surface images tend to be of dry surfaces because road surface conditions are highly correlated with weather conditions. This could be a challenge in developing road surface detection algorithms. This paper proposes a method to balance the imbalanced dataset using CycleGAN to improve the performance of a road surface detection algorithm. CycleGAN was used to artificially generate images of wet and snow-covered roads. The road surface detection algorithm trained using the CycleGAN-augmented dataset had a better IoU than the method using imbalanced basic datasets. This result shows that CycleGAN-generated images can be used as datasets for road surface detection to improve the performance of DNN, and this method can help make the data acquisition process easy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomous mobile robots are usually faced with challenging situations when driving in complex environments. Namely, they have to recognize the static and dynamic obstacles, plan the driving path and execute their motion. For addressing the issue of perception and path planning, in this paper, we introduce OctoPath, which is an encoder-decoder deep neural network, trained in a self-supervised manner to predict the local optimal trajectory for the ego-vehicle. Using the discretization provided by a 3D octree environment model, our approach reformulates trajectory prediction as a classification problem with a configurable resolution. During training, OctoPath minimizes the error between the predicted and the manually driven trajectories in a given training dataset. This allows us to avoid the pitfall of regression-based trajectory estimation, in which there is an infinite state space for the output trajectory points. Environment sensing is performed using a 40-channel mechanical LiDAR sensor, fused with an inertial measurement unit and wheels odometry for state estimation. The experiments are performed both in simulation and real-life, using our own developed GridSim simulator and RovisLab's Autonomous Mobile Test Unit platform. We evaluate the predictions of OctoPath in different driving scenarios, both indoor and outdoor, while benchmarking our system against a baseline hybrid A-Star algorithm and a regression-based supervised learning method, as well as against a CNN learning-based optimal path planning method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]